The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Okay!” Mary said, chopping short their flood of suggestions. She could see that the people in these divisions were feeling a little neglected. Finance had filled her head for too long. And as Bob Wharton had just said, you could literally fill a medium-sized encyclopedia with the good new projects already invented and waiting to scale. “Admitted; there’s no end to the good projects we could fund, if we had the funds. But what should we be telling national governments to do now?”

  Bob said, “Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.”

  “The six biggest emitters being?”

  “Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector.”

  “Cross-sector?”

  “Everything not in the other five. The great miscellaneous.”

  “So those six would be enough.”

  “Yes. Reduce those six in the ten biggest economies, and you’re hitting eighty-five percent of all emissions. Get the G20 to do it, and it’s essentially everything.”

  “And how do you get reductions in those six sectors?”

  Eleven policies would get it done, they all told her. Carbon pricing, industry efficiency standards, land use policies, industrial process emissions regulations, complementary power sector policies, renewable portfolio standards, building codes and appliance standards, fuel economy standards, better urban transport, vehicle electrification, and feebates, which was to say carbon taxes passed back through to consumers. In essence: laws. Regulatory laws, already written and ready to go.

  “This sounds like a litany,” Mary observed.

  Yes, they told her, it was standard analysis. US Department of Energy in origin, quite old now, but still holding up well as an analytic rubric. The EU energy task force had done something similar. Really there were no mysteries here, in either the nature of the problem or the solutions.

  “And yet it’s not happening,” Mary observed.

  They regarded her. There is resistance to it happening, they reminded her.

  “Indeed,” she said. They were caught in a maze. They were caught in an avalanche, carrying them down past a point from which there would be no clawing back. They were losing. Losing to other people, people who apparently didn’t see the stakes involved.

  She walked down to the park fronting the lake. She sat on her bench and stared at the statue of Ganymede, holding his hand out to the big bird. She watched the white swans beside the tiny marina, circling about, hoping for bread crumbs. Beautiful creatures. Bodies so white against the black water that they looked like intrusions from another reality. That would explain the way water rolled off them, the way the light burst away from them, or perhaps right out of them. Not creatures of this world at all.

  It wasn’t going to happen from the top. The lawmakers were corrupt. So, if not top-down, then bottom-up. Like a whirlwind, as some put it. Whirlwinds rose from the ground— although conditions aloft enabled that to happen. People, the multitude. Young people? Not just congregating to demonstrate, but changing all their behaviors? Living together in tiny houses, working at green jobs in co-operative ventures, with never the chance of a big financial windfall somehow dropping on them like a lottery win? No unicorns carrying them off to a high fantasy paradise? Occupying the offices of every politician who got elected by taking carbon money and then always voted for the one percent? Riot strike riot?

  She didn’t know if her failure to imagine that bottom-up plan working was her failure or the situation’s.

  Then Badim appeared before her.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “No. Sit.” She patted the bench by her. She supposed he had been able to consult her bodyguards to find out where she was. This was a little disturbing, but she was glad to see him.

  He sat beside her and regarded the view. “Who was Ganymede again?” he asked, regarding the statue.

  “I think he was one of Zeus’s lovers.”

  “A gay lover?”

  “The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to think about things in those terms.”

  “I guess not. Didn’t Zeus rape most of his lovers?”

  “Some of them. Not all. If I recall right. I don’t really know. In Ireland it wasn’t a school topic. What about in India?”

  “I grew up in Nepal, but no. Greek mythology was not studied.”

  “What about Hindu mythology? Don’t they have gods behaving badly?”

  “Oh yes. I don’t know, I never paid it much attention, but the gods and goddesses seemed like a family of, I don’t know. Distant ancestors. Very heroic and noble, very proud and stupid. It made me wonder what the people were like who told each other these stories in the first place, as if they were interesting stories. Like Bollywood musicals. So melodramatic. I was never interested.”

  “What interested you?”

  “Machines. I wanted my town to be like the towns in the West, you know. Clean. Easy. Full of shiny buildings and trams. And cable car lifts, for sure. I had to walk four hundred meters up and down to get to school and then back home, every day. So. I wanted it to be kind of like Zurich, actually. I wanted to move into the present. I felt like I was caught in a time warp, stuck in the middle ages. You could see on the screen shows what the world was like now, but for us it wasn’t like that. No toilets, no antibiotics, people died of diarrhoea all the time. In general people were sick, they were worn out, they died young. I wanted to change that.”

  “You were lucky to want something.”

  “I don’t know. Wanting something can make you unhappy. I was not happy. I lashed out.”

  “Happiness is overrated. Is anyone ever really happy?”

  “Oh, I think so. It looks like it, anyway.” He gestured around them.

  Zurich, so solid and handsome. Were the Zurchers happy? Mary wasn’t sure. Swiss happiness was expressed by a little lift at the corners of the mouth, by thumping down a stein after a long swallow. Ah! Genau! Or by that little frown of displeasure that things were not better than they were. Mary liked the Swiss, their practicality anyway. Undemonstrative, stable, focused on reality. These were stereotypes, sure, and in the part of their lives hidden except to themselves, the Swiss were no doubt as melodramatic as opera stars. Italian soap opera stars, another stereotype of course, those were all they had once they started thinking about groups, they simplified to an image, and then that image could always be turned to the bad.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. “People who have it all, who don’t want anything, they’re lost. If you want something and your work gets you closer to it, that’s the only happiness.”

  “The pursuit,” he said.

  “Yes. The pursuit of happiness is the happiness.”

  “Then we should be happy!”

  “Yes,” she said unhappily. “But only if we get somewhere. If you’re pursuing something and you’re stuck, really stuck, then that’s not a pursuit anymore. That’s just being stuck.”

  Badim nodded, regarding the great statue curiously.

  Mary thought he had come down here to tell her something, surely; but he had not done that. She watched him for a while. Nepal had fallen to a Maoist insurrection that had killed thirteen thousand people over a period of about ten years. Some would call that a lot; others would say it wasn’t so many.

  “I notice things happening out there,” she said to him. “Davos gets seized and the happy rich folk put through a reeducation camp. Glamping with Che. Then all those planes going down in one day.”

  “We didn’t do that!” he said quickly. “That wasn’t us.”

  “No? It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.”

  He shook his head, looking surprised she would even think such a thing. “I wouldn’t do that, Mary. If we had any such violent action in mind, I would confer with you. But really we’re not in that kind of business.�
�

  “So, these so-called accidents happening to oil executives?”

  “It’s a big world,” he said. Ah ha, Mary thought. He was trying not to look uneasy.

  “So,” she said, “what did you come down here to discuss? Why did you find me and come down here?”

  He looked at her. “I do have an idea,” he said. “I wanted to tell you.”

  “Tell me.”

  He looked off at the city for a while. Gray Zurich. “I think we need a new religion.”

  She stared at him, surprised. “Really?”

  He turned his gaze on her. “Well, maybe it’s not a new religion. An old religion. Maybe the oldest religion. But back among us, big time. Because I think we need it. People need something bigger than themselves. All these economic plans, always talking about things in terms of money and self-interest— people aren’t really like that. They’re always acting for other reasons than that. For other people, basically. For religious reasons. Spiritual reasons.”

  Mary shook her head, unsure. She’d got enough of that kind of thing in her childhood. Ireland had not seemed to have benefited from its religion.

  Badim saw this and wagged a finger at her. “It’s a huge part of the brain, you know. The temporal lobe pulses like a strobe light when you feel these emotions. Sense of awe— epilepsy— hypergraphia …”

  “It’s not sounding that good,” Mary pointed out.

  “I know, it can go wrong, but it’s crucial. It’s central to who you are, to how you decide things.”

  “So you’re going to invent a new religion.”

  “An old one. The oldest one. We’re going to bring it back. We need it.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “Well, let me share some ideas with you.”

  57

  Next season I was back down there again, helping with the seawater pumping experiment, even though it was obvious to all of us that it was a crazy idea. Ten million wind power turbines? Thousands of pipelines? Not going to happen. It was a fantasy cure.

  But someone had to try it. And the project had one more season of funding. So we got the pump intake back through the sea ice into the water. Then we followed the pipeline up the big white hill. It was laid right on the ground, because snow or ice was a better insulator than air, and warmer too. Still, a big part of the total energy budget was for heating the pipes to keep the water liquid on its way to its destination. The rest of the energy was simply to move the water uphill. And water is heavy, and Antarctica is high. So, whatever. An experiment or an exercise in futility, depending on your view.

  There were people proposing to generate energy from ocean currents. The Antarctic Current runs around the continent like a belt, clockwise as seen from above, and of course it gets channelized through the Drake Passage; if electricity could be generated from that faster section of the current, great. But none of us thought it would work. The sea eats everything you put in it, and the size and number of turbines that could spin up enough electricity to do the job was off the charts.

  Then there were those who still held the dream of space-based electricity. Russians for the most part. They had used their Molniya orbit for communications satellites for a long time— this being an almost polar orbit, in an elliptical shape that brings it close to Earth twice a day. So the Russians were putting up satellites with solar panels and microwave transmitters to send power down to Earth. Microwave collection stations were to be located by the Antarctic pumps and heating elements, and electricity thus beamed down from space to help power the warmed seawater uphill and inland, even during the long night of the Antarctic winter.

  Maybe, we said. Although the truth is that solar power from space is not likely to work very well. Capture, transmission, reception, all problematic.

  Even if a sufficient power supply was found, people would still be required at the upper ends of the pipelines to oversee the water getting poured out up there. So this season we tried that part too, and it was a weird sight to see. Typical polar plateau scene, Ice Planet Zero, a sastrugied white plane to every horizon, domed by a dark blue sky very low overhead, stupendously awesome, you feel like the Little Prince and have to pinch yourself from time to time, also do some Pete Townshends to keep your hands warm, it’s fucking cold that goes without saying— and then there’s this pipeline like some bad dream from Alaska, their oil pipeline I mean, a nightmare. But there it is.

  When the water pours out of the end of this pipe, it steams madly in the dry polar air and then sploshes down onto the ice and runs away, just as we had planned it, having aimed the nozzle down a slight hill. But the tilt of this so-called hill was about two meters in every kilometer, as good as we could get in the region. So we got surprised by how fast the water froze. Maybe we shouldn’t have been, most of us had tried the old Antarctic trick of taking a pot of boiling water outside and tossing it into the air to watch it steam and crackle and freeze to ice bits before it hits the ground— it’s an experiment that never ceases to amaze. Always good for a laugh. But pouring it out in quantity, as from a fire hose or a sewer outflow, we thought it would take longer.

  Not so. In fact, newly frozen ice stacked just a few meters from the end of our pipe, creating a low dam that checked the water’s progress, making downhill no longer down, so that the unfrozen water began to flow back toward the pipe outlet, and then past it in the other direction. Oh no!

  We hustled down to the little ice dam and started trying to break it, which worked about as well as you might expect. In the midst of our fuss, as we yelled directions at each other, not desperate but maybe a little panicked, Jordi shouted, Hey I’m stuck! Help!

  He was standing in what had been ankle deep water near the outlet, which was now ice that had him stuck in place, with more water flowing over his boots all the while. Help!

  We laughed, we cursed, we tried to cut him out, nothing worked. He was not in imminent danger, but on the other hand we couldn’t free him. And in the race between rising ice and the newly emerged water sliding slickly over it, the ice was winning. It actually takes quite a bit of thermal energy for water to turn into ice, the process actually warms things a little, weird though that seems, but at 30 degrees below zero that warming is a hard thing to detect, or rather it has little to no effect on anything. The frost steaming up from the mess fell on us like Christmas tree flocking, and it began to look like we couldn’t get Jordi out without chopping his feet off, which gave me an idea. Pull him out of his fucking boots, I said. Leave his boots.

  This was easier said than done, but luckily he was wearing NSF’s white rubber bunny boots, rather than the more tightly fitted mountaineering boots that most of us had on, so we were able to stand by him and give him something to hold on to while we all pulled him up and out of the boots, him cursing as he got his feet up and out in the ridiculously cold air, after which we had to half-carry him to the heated dining hut. Someone had shut off the water quite a bit before, I don’t know who, I have to admit it hadn’t occurred to me, we were in the midst of an experiment, I don’t like to cut those short. Anyway, Jordi’s boots are still stuck out there, NSF will not be pleased, they will ding us for it.

  So Jordi was saved, but the problem remained— water was going to freeze fast enough to create a problem in getting it to flow across the surface of the ice. The pipe outlet would have to be whipping back and forth like a hose on the driveway with too much pressure in it— which maybe could be arranged, but yikes, how to control that, it’s kind of non-linear. A sharper gradient would help too, although on the polar plateau those are not easy to find.

  So we closed down for a week, and rebuilt one outlet to emerge under pressure and snake back and forth like a windshield wiper, see how that went. And when we tried it again, water came out of the pipe and flowed downhill and froze along the way, and finally pooled pretty well away from the outlet, where it mounded and the new water shifted and flowed around it and slid down yet again. And we got better and better at mappi
ng where it might ultimately pool, and staying out of those pools while it happened.

  The estimate we came away with was that we could deposit about a meter of water per year on any part of the polar plateau and still have it freeze successfully. More than that and we would be exceeding the capacity of the air and ice in combination to chill the water. So we would need a wide spreading zone; at a meter thick, that would be about a third of Antarctica.

  Not going to happen, no way in the world. We had firmly established a trifecta of impossibilities: not enough energy, not enough pipe, not enough land.

  So the straight-up seawater pumping solution wasn’t going to work. It was a fantasy solution. The beaches of the world were fucked.

  A lot of us didn’t want the beaches of the world to be fucked. As we sat in our little habitats, like mobile homes half filled with insulation, we would gather around the table looking at maps and talking it over. World maps, I mean.

  The endorheic basins of the world, meaning basins where water does not drain to the sea, were many in number. And many of them in the northern hemisphere were dry playas, where water had existed at the end of the last ice age but dried out since, partially or all the way. The Caspian Sea had been helped to dry down to its current level by people, the Aral Sea even more so. The Tarim Basin was completely dry all on its own, Utah’s Great Salt Lake was the remnant of a much bigger lake from the past— on and on it went, mostly in Asia and North America, and the Sahara. Of course there were people living in some of these places, but not many of them, given the problems of desertification, or disasterated shorelines in the case of the Caspian and Aral. If you added up their volume of empty available space, it was considerable. A lot of seawater could be relocated there, in theory. We ran the numbers; well, it would do for a meter or two of sea level rise. But then all those basins would be full, and you’d be back to the unworkabilities of Antarctica.